There is no universal right way to live, but the platforms keep presenting life as if there were.
Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram turn existence into a hall of mirrors. Someone is travelling more, earning more, healing faster, raising better children, building a cleaner morning routine, finding their purpose, buying the van, leaving the city, moving to the city, lifting heavier, reading more books, becoming more spiritual, becoming less spiritual. Every swipe offers another life you could be failing to live.
After a while, you stop asking, What feels true for me? and start asking, How am I doing compared with the lives I can see?
Life begins to feel like a continuous assessment. You become both the student and the examiner, checking your days against criteria you never consciously chose. The standards change before you can meet them because the feed must keep moving. Yesterday you needed discipline. Today you need softness. Tomorrow someone will tell you that softness is avoidance and what you need is a 5 a.m. ice bath.
The struggle to “get life right” can become the very thing that removes you from your own life. Your attention moves away from the actual texture of your days: the work that absorbs you, the people around whom your body relaxes, the pace at which your mind opens, the small practices that restore you. Instead, you begin organising yourself around borrowed desires.
And borrowed desires are difficult to satisfy. Even when you get what you thought you wanted, the experience can feel strangely hollow because the wanting came from somewhere else.
I don’t know whether the core self is a fixed thing waiting underground to be uncovered. It may be closer to a grain in the wood, a direction in which your life bends when you stop forcing it. You notice it through contact: what gives you energy, what leaves a sour taste, what you keep returning to when nobody is watching, what kind of trouble feels worth having.
Living in accordance with that grain won’t necessarily make life easier. It may make you less legible to the people selling the approved versions. You may want a smaller life than the feed admires, or a stranger one. You may care deeply about something that photographs badly. You may discover that the life which fits you contains long stretches that look like nothing much from the outside.
Perhaps the question isn’t Am I living the right way?
Perhaps it is:
Whose idea of “right” is running through my head?
And beneath that:
What does my life begin to do when nobody else is scoring it?